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A intense discussion recently went viral across online platforms, after a user asked a query for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest with a man or a bear? Like all the most engaging thought experiments, it revealed wildly different perspectives and experiences, highlighted divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it for too long. Additionally, there came the predictable coda in which some males came online to tell females how foolish they were for choosing the bear and went on to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at minimum allowed the women who had been hesitating about their decision to decide with a new confidence.

Dramatising the Scenario

The Bear-Cooking Tale effectively brings to life this nifty small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Scandinavian writer the novelist’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for an English audience). It follows the struggles of a pastor (the lead actor) and his household as they come to start a new ministry within Kengis, an isolated settlement in northern Sweden, during the mid-19th century. In a place with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants particularly warm to his strict approach to alcohol and revelry, but it is his protection of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from among whom comes the pastor’s foster child Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in societal fairness and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis powers that be.

The Opposing Forces

Soon collaborating opposing him are the lawman Brahe (Magnus Krepper), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially dismissing a recently mangled laborer with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who benefit from a populace easily swayed with some containers of liquor provided by the unsettling store owner Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). However, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist Beronius appears on the scene (the performer, delivering a performance of rare discomfiting power). While they remain – similar to the clergyman – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least effective ones.

Plot Progression

Once the foundations of tension sown, it is time to get down to narrative business. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), duly vanishes in the forest. Signs of her flight and animal scratches upon a trunk are found but she is completely absent. Rumours and fears regarding a human-devouring beast roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view which he and his ward set out to prove.

An Odd Beast

This Bear Drama is a slightly odd beast. It conjures a fine sense of the bleakness that lets suspicion and bias and grim legends thrive based on local folklore that bears can be controlled or possessed by the spirits of men. And it doesn’t romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, in which brutality, be it from nature or people, lurks constantly on the edges, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and revenge, rationality and religion, virtue and evil escalate, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.

Tonal Inconsistencies

Additionally, exist numerous stylistically clashing instances in which the clergyman’s skill in finding evidence and determine Hilda’s fate turns almost risible. He stands looking at shattered containers and strands of fur in hay barns like a combined the Belgian detective and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a particularly unfortunate Hastings-cum-Watson (none of whom were required to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that, yes, it was clearly dried blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body out of a swamp.

Opposing Goals

The village elite are determined demonstrating that the maid was killed by a bear, perhaps to preserve the peace, or possibly to shield one of their own. The clergyman is bent on establishing the opposite, and the proof so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that again the drama’s plausibility and the viewer’s patience get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear evokes memories of the adaptation some years back of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the competing attractions and terrors offered by rational thought and religion. At its worst, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Nevertheless, it appears to provide the answer to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”

• The series is on Disney+ now.